Ant.Lab

Goal

The goal of this in-class exercise is to help you get oriented to the build system standards for this class, and the use of Checkstyle, PMD, and FindBugs to improve the quality of your Java systems. .

Automated Quality Assurance vs. Manual Quality Assurance

After reading John's review of my CodeRuler assignment, I found most of his points to be valid and equitable. We did miss some key points as far as Javadoc format and content, simplifying if-else statements and function calls and some formatting errors. If I were to go and fixed the issues that John picked out, I would take an estimated 5-10 minutes on styling issues, and perhaps another 15-45 minutes with redesign and implementation. On the flip-side, when running an automated QA, seriously amazed by how much the human eye can miss! 500+ Checkstyle errors/warnings alone. This is a serious efficiency improvement, mainly because it literally took seconds to generate this huge list, each with this own reasoning, and explanation.

When considering actually sitting down and taking the time to fixing some of these (extremely) minor errors, the time-cost factor comes into play. After running eclipse formatter through each of the files downloaded from IBM, it dramatically reduced the amount of Checkstyle errors across the classes. PMD produced about 30 of priority 1 & 3 errors throughout the project, all which seem very easy to fix. These findings are definitely something that a human eye will not catch verbatim.

Conclusion

I'll conclude by saying by saying that the Automated QA is worth the integrity and quality of your project. It will be a time consuming process, but the caliber of your code will be at best. It is easy to spot hard work when you see it. The last thing you want to be judged on are your flaws.